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Thursday, July 07, 2016

`An Air of Baffled Absence'

While
reading Tolstoy: A Biography (1988), I
was surprised to see A.N. Wilson places a well-known but unexpected epigraph at the head of Chap. 13, “The Holy Man,” which recounts the years after Anna Karenina, published when the novelist
was forty-nine:

“At
death you break up: the bits that were you

Start
speeding away from each other for ever

With
no one to see.”

Yes,
it’s that old motivational speaker Philip Larkin in “The Old Fools” (High Windows, 1974), a poem as grim and amusing
as any he ever wrote. The opening stanzas will no doubt be dismissed as “micro aggressions”,
a gleeful exercise in cruelty: “Ash hair, toad hands, prune face dried into
lines.” I think that’s called “ageist shaming,” but Larkin never absolves
himself of such judgments. He was born with a middle-aged soul, and a few years
after “The Old Fools” he would describe himself as “an egg sculpted in lard,
wearing goggles.” The poem’s central question, spoken from just this side of
old age, comes at the end of the first stanza: “Why aren’t they screaming?” We
spend our lives ignoring death, pretending it is no more than a theory, an
abstraction we can wipe from the blackboard. But as Larkin says in “Aubade,” we
keep death “just on the edge of vision, / A small, unfocused blur, a standing
chill / That slows each impulse down to indecision.” Arrogantly, we deem
ourselves immune. Larkin’s speaker looks at the old fools and wonder how they
put up with decrepitude and the knowledge of imminent extinction. He speculates:

“Perhaps
being old is having lighted rooms

Inside
your head, and people in them, acting

People
you know, yet can't quite name.”

In
other words, to use an unforgiving word, delusion, telling oneself a comforting
story. The tone of the poem has quietly shifted. The speaker is no longer
mocking the old fools but trying to understand how they endure. Those interior
rooms are memories, which are always laced with fiction. We tell stories to endure.
For all his hatred of romanticized cant, Larkin sympathizes with the old fools
and their strategies: “That is where they live: / Not here and now, but where
all happened once. / This is why they give / An air of baffled absence, trying
to be there / Yet being here.” Now it makes sense why Wilson used the Larkin
passage at this point in Tolstoy’s life. He was middle-aged and blocked as a
novelist, as Larkin was soon blocked from writing poetry, and was undergoing
one of many religious crises (never an option for Larkin). As Wilson reports on
the next page:

“His
imagination was no longer fully engaged with the history of his own past or
that of his country. Instead, it had become engaged with the eternally
unanswerable questions which were aroused by his visit to the Optina Monastery.”